“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not
properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn't be appreciated. I had
very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and
they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I
might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still
remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to
music school—she said, “You’re WASTING your SAT scores.” On some level,
I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music
was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to
classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its
function. 

So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that
puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper,
and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has
absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s
the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music,
and how it works.

The first people to understand how music
really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate
you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the
same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between
observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the
study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects.
Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our
hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things
inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet
for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in
1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against
Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent
across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and
a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a
cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet
with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941
for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is
one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing
music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and
water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would
anyone bother with music? And yet—from the camps, we have poetry, we
have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic
Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where
people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the
obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. 

The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without
recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art
is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable
expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am
alive, and my life has meaning.”

On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the
keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my
hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter?
Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given
what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent,
pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in
time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of
getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in
fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano
again. And then I observed how we got through the day. At least in my
neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play
cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most
certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I
saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang
around fire houses, people sang “We Shall Overcome”. Lots of people
sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I
remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center,
with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression
of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a
concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life> might go on.
The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts,
and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our
budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a
basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of
our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no
words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t
with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heart wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which companied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War.  If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good
therapist does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings—people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of
the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments
after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around
those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so
that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can
you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with
the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just
the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start
crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the
movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The
Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between
invisible internal objects.

I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in
Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to
please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I
thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign
heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place
in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we
often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World
War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who
was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about
the pieces we are going to play rather than providing> them with
written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert
with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the
program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front
of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was
clearly a soldier—even in his 70’s, it was clear from his buzz-cut
hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of
his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone
would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular
piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and
we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in
which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed
pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he
had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see
him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to
explain himself.

What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out,
and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had
engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so
as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend
drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not
thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music
you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though
I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now,
but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was
written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could
handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and
those memories in me?”

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and
to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember
and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year’s freshman class
when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will
charge your sons and daughters with is this:

“If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing
appen..omies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would
imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your
emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my
friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert
hall and bring you a mind that is> confused, a heart that is
overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will
depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isnâ<™t about
dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I’m not an
entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue
worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a
spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who
works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if
we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and
well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to
master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future
wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to
war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect
it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no
longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which
together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If
there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an
understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit
together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what
we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the
artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal,
invisible lives.”